


Power of Three

by MLMDarkFiction



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Canon, EXTREME Canon Divergence, M/M, Multi, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 16:49:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21413437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MLMDarkFiction/pseuds/MLMDarkFiction
Summary: Instead of confiding in each other when odd things begin to happen to them in their everyday lives, David, Jeff, and Danny decide to keep it to themselves instead, leading to things becoming worse and worse until they all disappear one by one.
Relationships: David King/Danny "Jed Olsen" Johnson | The Ghost Face, David King/Jeffrey "Jeff" Johansen, David King/Jeffrey "Jeff" Johansen/Danny "Jed Olsen" Johnson | The Ghost Face, Jeffrey "Jeff" Johansen/Danny "Jed Olsen" Johnson |The Ghost Face
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	Power of Three

Jeff wakes with a start, covered in a sheen a sweat, hair sticking to his face. A nightmare. That’s what it was. He recognizes this fact immediately, as he’s met with the familiar surroundings of the apartment he shared with his boyfriends.

He’d fallen asleep on the couch again. A bad habit the man had formed some time ago. His nightmare, he notes, was probably caused by the playing of Halloween, left on the TV.

He’s sure Danny was watching with him, but maybe the other man had ditched him when he’d started to snore. Wouldn’t be the first time he complained about Jeff falling asleep while they’re supposed to be watching something, and then snoring so loud he can’t actually enjoy it.

Turning the TV off doesn’t calm his post nightmare anxiety, neither does realizing he can hear both of his boyfriends bickering somewhere else within the apartment.

Jeff lies on his back, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes making patterns in the white paint. The dream, or more accurately the nightmare is still fresh in his mind. It’s odd enough that he remembers it at all.

Woods, dark woods, and he’s running for his life from something but…he can’t quite remember what. Whatever it was that was chasing him, it was blending into the darkness, blending in and-

“Hey! Why’d you turn the movie off?”

Any more thoughts on his nightmare are interrupted by Danny literally flopping onto him on the couch. He’s got a bowl of popcorn with him, as reaches over for the remote.  
  
“You don’t get to fall asleep on me **and** turn off my movie, that’s fucked up.”

“Sorry. What were you and David fighting about?”  
  
“What do we always fight about?”  
  
Speak of the devil.

Danny doesn’t elaborate, just sticking his tongue out at David before shoving a handful of popcorn into his mouth.

“Fuck you.”  
“Fuck me yourself, coward.”

It’s normal. The normalcy is enough to calm any left-over anxiety. He readjusts the Danny on his lap, sitting up to enjoy the rest of the movie.

-

Danny is jittery. Something just doesn’t feel **right** about his walk. He grips the knife in his pocket, he carries it for protection, even if his boyfriends argue it’s a bit much.

It’s not uncommon for him to go out this late. He does it all the time, taking photos of things just slightly off putting enough to be interesting.

The photos he takes for the paper are all mundane, just shots of people and events, things that are boring and a waste of his time. No one cares about the photo’s he actually wants to take. No one but Jeff…and maybe David. Danny’s still not convinced that David just pretends to be interested in what he and Jeff talk about when it comes to art.

He doesn’t take long to think on this though Every other step he takes fills him with anxiety. It’s like something in the darkness is _watching_ him.

He’s the people watcher, he’s the predator. This role reversal is what makes it incredibly nerve wracking. He knows what he would do if he were the stalker in this situation, and it terrifies him. 

Finally, he’s had enough, pointing his camera into the darkness and taking a photo. The flash lights up the dark…at least some of it. Danny saw it, a large portion of the darkness, a blob of it seemingly unmoved or caring about the camera’s flash.

Maybe his eyes are playing tricks on him, maybe…

Danny snaps another photo, just in case he is seeing things, but no, the flash once again penetrates only _some_ of the darkness.

The rest seems to be advancing on him, getting closer, and closer.

Fuck.

Whatever it is advancing on him, he’s not waiting to see what it will do. He turns, high tailing it off the path as fast as he can, not even stopping when his camera slips from his grasp crashing onto the rocky ground below, only to be absorbed like everything else into the darkness. 

-

David went out to the bar by himself. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy spending time with his boyfriends, he does, but it’s much easier to blow off steam without them. You see David enjoys getting into fights. He enjoys the adrenaline rush he gets while tussling with some drunken rando, and he enjoys the fact that nine times out of ten he _wins_. And he used these fights, and these wins, to justify his masculinity to himself.

One of the reasons his boyfriends insisted he doesn’t _need_ to do this. That he has nothing to prove to himself, or to others.

David knows, on some level that they’re right, but that doesn’t stop him from needing to do this. So when Danny’s sick, and Jeff’s busy taking care of him he manages to convince them both he’ll be fine to go out on his own for a little. He does feel a bit guilty leaving his sick boyfriend just to go out drinking and fighting, but he needs this. And besides, it’s not as if there’s anything he can do that Jeff can’t.

The bartender knows David, even with how little he’s come in recently, David see’s how the man’s eyes narrow. A reminder that he will be kicked out if he starts anything inside, any fighting he wants to do should be outside the bar. David can respect that.

He keeps to the rules, at least until he finds a man drunk and belligerent enough to piss him off. David’s the one who gets up, grabbing the man from the shoulder, and pulling him back from the bar.

“Come on- You and me. Outside.”

The drunken man blinks several times, taking multiple minutes to actually understand what it is David’s said to him, and by then the much younger man’s already pulling the drunkard out of the bar and into the street.

David doesn’t even get a chance to throw a punch before the other man is torn free from his gasp, fist colliding with the side of David’s face.

It stings, but more than the physical pain is the shame of knowing he just got slammed by someone who was far more intoxicated then him.

This was supposed to be an easy fight, once David could win without a scratch, and then return home his ego inflated, not get almost KO’d in one shot.

He stumbles back, leaning against the wall, and it’s then he realizes there’s something off with this man he’d chosen to fight. What was definitely just a regular drunkard before was now definitely… something inhuman. It’s the eyes. That’s what makes him realize that something is wrong.

The drunkards eyes, they’re pure black.

All David knows is that suddenly he’s back, in front of his home, no strange black-eyed man in sight. He makes his way inside, but no matter how much he tries, David’s unable to relax until sunrise.

-  
  
Maybe things would have gone differently if they had told each other about the odd things that were happening. The nightmares, the stalking, the strangers with pitch black eyes.

But they don’t. All three seemed to silently agree to keep their discoveries to themselves. Jeff simply doesn’t want to worry his boyfriends with something as simple as reoccurring nightmares. Danny’s afraid that his experiences are nothing more than his mental state **deteriorating**, and what revealing his struggles to his boyfriends could mean in the long run. And David is simply unwilling to admit to the others that this problem all came back to his fighting, something he was supposed to have given up already.

And by refusing to share their experiences with each other, they doomed themselves.

It’s Danny who goes missing first.

He was there one day, and the next he was gone. As far as David and Jeff knew, aside from them, he had no friends, no family, no one else to **miss** him. It was almost as if he’d never even existed in the first place.

But that’s not true. He did exist. And they did miss him. Everyday.

Both men were a wreck, and although they tried everything in their power to figure out just what had happened…

They never learned anything.

The police even went as far as to claim that, because there was no evidence, that perhaps Danny had willingly left to start fresh somewhere, or that he’d even gone as far as to **kill** himself, doing so in a way that they hadn’t yet found the body.

But neither man could allow themselves to believe such a thing. For all his quirks and occasional bitterness, Danny loved them. There’s no situation in which he’d leave them, but even if somehow, for some reason, Danny did decide he was going to leave…then why would he leave his camera?

It’s his prized possession, and like all of Danny’s other things, it stays untouched exactly where he’d last left it in the apartment.

When Jeff goes missing-

At least when Jeff goes missing David’s able to make some sense of it.

His mind is whirring with all sorts of theories.

But the one that makes the most sense, is what the police thought happened to Danny.

David thinks, tries to accept, the very real possibility that Jeff killed himself.

The man had struggled with his mental health long before Danny had disappeared, and although Jeff had done his best to keep it from David, he wasn’t stupid, he saw how everything just kept getting **worse**, and that there was nothing that David could do to stop it.

And with both Jeff and Danny gone, all that left was David. David completely alone in an apartment far to big for the one person, an apartment filled to the brim with reminders of people who are no longer with him.

He breaks within days.

David doesn’t care about the black-eyes stranger that he’d confronted before at the bar, or the fear the man had caused.

He wants a drink.

And what’s more…

What does he care? What does he have to be afraid of? What does he have to live for **now**?

David welcomes the inevitable fate that awaits him that night when he goes to the bar. He welcomes the group of men, talking in too loud drunk voices, about mugging him. He welcomes the fight and beating that follows.

It goes as well for David as one would expect. A three versus one fight, that leaves David bleeding out alone in the dark of the alley way behind the bar.

But…he doesn’t die.

Despite his deliriousness, the alcohol, the bleeding out, David is still aware enough of his surroundings to notice the shift. He notices the way the world around him shifts into darkness. The void shifts and turns around him

-

When David comes to, it’s not the dim streetlights of the alleyway that he’s faced with, but the unfamiliar crackling of a campfire.

“Jeff- Jeff he’s awake!”

He doesn’t get to question what’s going on. The campfire, the unfamiliar female voice, and the name. Jeff’s name.

David doesn’t get to question it because he’s pulled into an embrace, a familiar one at that. It’s Jeff. It smells like Jeff, it feels like Jeff, and the fast talking, blubbering voice above him definitely belongs to Jeff.

“Jeff?”

“Yeah?”

“Please stop crying. I have a headache…and that sound is just…the worst.”

It’s comfortable though, being held by Jeff again, after all this time thinking he was dead. Even if David can feel the prying eyes of strangers watching the two of them.

“I thought you were-“

“Dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Not dead just…here.”

David finally looks around to get in a look of their encompassing surroundings. Fog, a darkened forest, and the campfire surrounded by equally confused and damaged looking group of people.

“Where exactly is **here**?”

He listens to the explanation from Jeff and the others; an Entity, and a never-ending game of life and death meant to keep it fed on all of their individual suffering.

Still despite the explanation, David’s just thinking one thing.

He cups Jeff’s face.

“If _you’re_ here does that mean….”

The other man doesn’t have to answer, the look of despair on the metal heads face is more than enough of an answer.

Danny isn’t **here**.

-

At least as far as they know.

Because Danny _is_ within the Entity’s realm, simply not with the survivors. Danny was sent to the side of the Killers, their own fire, a sanctuary for them as well in between the **trials**.

He knew why.

Why he’d been chosen to be a **killer** and not a **survivor**.

He’s not ashamed of what he’d done before coming here, he refuses to be ashamed of his **art**.

But then Jeff arrived

The only thing Danny had missed at first in his pseudo captivity were his partners.

And then Jeff arrived.

His course of action was simple, and easy.

Under no situation was Jeff allowed to know that Danny was here, and under no situation was Jeff to find out what Danny had become- no, who Danny had always been.

Keeping his secret hidden was an easy enough task. It’s not as if the killers and survivors had any contact outside of the trials, and when faced with one another well…

Danny made sure Jeff was sacrificed. Every time. Every single trial.

-

This task only got harder with the addition of David, however.

David, who was more than happy to put himself between Jeff and harm’s way.

David, who without fail got Jeff down from the hook before the Entity could come.

And when David finally got tired of defending, and of saving, he got angry. The anger grew until he fought back.

A piece of glass lodging itself within Danny’s shoulder blade as he carried the boxers towards the hook.

The scream that ripped from his lips was familiar.

His game was over.

Identity discovered, not by the removal of a mask, but the pained scream which ripped from his throat.

There was no mistaking the glint of familiarity in David’s eyes, nor the way it was quickly replaced with _betrayal_.

Although the injury was far from severe, Ghost Face wasn’t seen for the rest of the match, the survivors, David included, were all able to leave, (mostly) unharmed.

-

David doesn’t tell Jeff.

He can’t bring himself to.

This place has already taken so much from the two of them, and there’s no reason to add to Jeff’s suffering.

It’s nicer, David thinks, to let Jeff continue to believe that Danny simply left them in the real world.

To let him think that at least one person he cares about may still be free, living a happy regular life, and not trapped in this hell hole.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic went through three total rewrites, and took several months. I'm very glad to have it be done and over with.


End file.
